Sqreen wants to become the IFTTT of web app security

French startup Sqreen recently launched a Security Hub with dozens of plugins to put you in control of the security of your web app. In many ways, it feels like enabling tasks on popular automation service IFTTT.

Sqreen participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield and Y Combinator’s current batch. The vision of the product hasn’t changed. Sqreen lets you protect your web service with little effort from your side.

Big companies have dedicated security teams that protect services, try to run attacks to find weaknesses and more. Smaller companies don’t necessarily have enough time and money to build a dedicated team. But your product is still vulnerable to SQL injections, XSS attacks and brute-force attacks.

Sqreen isn’t a firewall. You just have to install a library package on your server and add a couple of lines at the top your source code to require the Sqreen module in your application.

Once this is done, Sqreen monitors attacks in real time without a big performance hit — the startup says there’s a 4 percent CPU overhead. Sqreen now works for web apps in Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Python or Java.

In addition to protecting you against common attacks, Sqreen makes security recommendations so that you can regularly fix vulnerabilities. And with GDPR coming soon, tech companies have a greater responsibility when it comes to protecting customer data and disclosing hacks.

Customers wanted to know more about what Sqreen was doing. That’s why Sqreen launched a security hub with documented plugins.

“All security vendors are very secretive,” Sqreen co-founder and CEO Pierre Betouin. “Usually, you can’t test the product and you have no information on what they do. We were like this at the beginning of Sqreen. Our positioning was really ‘install our library and we’ll cover a range of security features.’”

“We had a big push back. So we wondered how we could be more transparent, provide something more rational. We explain each plugin completely.”

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You can find a plugin to protect you against SQLite injections, vulnerable dependencies, XSS Javascript injections in various frameworks, bot activity, etc.

Sqreen will recommend plugins for your app depending on the technologies and frameworks you’re using. You can then enable or disable each plugin and configure notifications on Slack or PagerDuty for instance.

In the future, you can imagine that third-party companies could contribute to this marketplace and add new plugins. Sqreen is also working on other plugins related to email abuse and payment page protection.